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Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||
III
The Renaissance phase in the history of our subject
begins with the opening
sentences of Leone Battista
Alberti's treatise De
statua, written about 1430. Here
the origin of sculpture is
described as follows:
Those [who were inclined to express and represent... the
bodies brought
forth by nature] would at times observe in
tree trunks, clumps of
earth, or other objects of this sort
certain lineaments which through
some slight changes could
be made to resemble a natural shape. They
thereupon took
thought and tried, by adding or taking away here and
there,
to render the resemblance complete.
Before long, Alberti adds, the primeval sculptors
learned how to make images
without depending on
such resemblances latent in their raw material.
This
passage is the earliest statement of the idea that what
sets the
artist apart from the layman is not his manual
skill but his ability to
discover images in random
shapes, i.e., his visual imagination, which in
turn gives
rise to the desire to make these images more explicit
by
adding or taking away.
How did Alberti arrive at this astonishing insight?
Classical art theory
provides no etiology of sculpture,
and its etiology of painting is purely
mimetic: the first
artist traced a shadow cast by the sun. Moreover,
in
contrast to the agate of Pyrrhus and the heads suppos-
edly discovered in cracked blocks of marble, the
chance
images in Alberti's tree trunks and clumps of earth are
rudimentary rather than miraculously complete. Per-
haps the key to the puzzle is the fact that Alberti
postulates
wood and clay, not stone or marble, as the
sculptor's aboriginal materials.
If he started out by
wondering what the earliest statues were made of, he
could have found an answer in Pliny (XII, i), who
concludes a
discussion of the central importance of
trees in the development of
religious practices by
stating that the statues of the gods, too, used to be
ex arbore. In view of the anthropomorphic shape
of
certain trees, reflected in such myths as that of Daphne
turned
into a laurel, this must have seemed plausible
enough. Another early work
of Alberti, the dialogue
Virtus et Mercurius, has Virtus complaining of
persist-
ent abuse at the hands of
Fortuna: “While I am thus
despised, I would rather be any tree
trunk than a
goddess,” a notion suggestive both of the Plinian
tree
deities and of the tree trunks in De
statua. This “trun-
kated” Virtue-in-distress was translated into visual
terms by Andrea Mantegna (Figure 9), whose image
of her might almost serve
as an illustration of the De
statua text. It
also resembles actual idols such as the
pair of tree-trunk deities carved
by a Teutonic con-
temporary of Pliny and
recently unearthed in a bog
near the German-Danish border (Figure 10).
Like many another explorer of new territory, Alberti
did not grasp the full
significance of what he had
severe limitations: it applies to sculpture only, and to
the remote past rather than to present artistic practice.
In his treatise on painting, written a few years after
De statua, he merely cites the ancient shadow-tracing
theory but adds that “it is of small importance to know
the earliest painters or the inventors of painting.”
When he mentions the chance images in cracked blocks
of marble and on the gem of Pyrrhus recorded by Pliny,
he does so in order to fortify his claim that painting
is a noble and “liberal” activity, since “nature herself
seems to take delight in painting.” He also explicitly
denies that painting is comparable to the kind of
sculpture “done by addition,” even though the painter
works by adding pigments to a bare surface.
This puzzling gulf that existed in Alberti's mind
between the two arts
reflects the singular importance
he attached to scientific perspective as
the governing
theory of painting. His treatise focuses on painting as
a rational method of representing the visible world,
rather than as a
physical process, and hence leaves little
room for the chance-image
etiology he had proposed
in De statua. We do
not know who first applied it to
painting and to present-day conditions.
The earliest
explicit statement occurs in the writings of Leonardo,
but the
passage strongly suggests that he learned it
from older artists:
If one does not like landscape, he esteems it a matter of
brief and
simple investigation, as when our Botticelli said
that such study
was vain, because by merely throwing a
sponge full of diverse
colors at a wall, it left a stain...
where a fine landscape was
seen. It is really true that various
inventions are seen in such a
stain.... But although those
stains give you inventions they will
not teach you to finish
any detail. This painter of whom I have
spoken makes very
dull landscapes
(Leonardo's Treatise on Painting, ed. and
trans. Philip McMahon, Princeton [1956], I, 59).
Apparently Leonardo here records an experience he
had about 1480, shortly
before his departure for Milan;
Botticelli, then at the height of his
career, plays the
role of an “anti-Protogenes” whose
views Leonardo
turns to his own advantage. In another passage,
Leonardo recommends that painters look for land-
scapes as well as figure compositions in the accidental
patterns
of stained walls, varicolored stones, clouds,
mud, or similar things, which
he compares to “the
sound of bells, in whose pealing you can
find every
name and word you can imagine.” The spotted
walls,
clouds, etc., here obviously play the same role as the
tree
trunks and clumps of earth in De statua.
Leonardo,
moreover, states more clearly than Alberti does that
chance
images are not objectively present but must
be projected into the material
by the artist's imagina-
tion. While he
presents his idea as “a new discovery,”
there can be
little doubt that he did in fact derive it
from Alberti, whose writings are
known to have influ-
enced his thinking in a
good many instances.
That Leonardo should have transferred the chance-
image theory from the remote past to the present and
from
sculpture to painting is hardly a surprise in view
of his lack of interest
in historical perspectives and his
deprecatory attitude toward sculpture.
At the same
time, the reference to Botticelli (whose remark may
well
have been aimed at Leonardo himself) suggests
that there was some awareness
among early Renais-
sance painters of the
role of chance effects in actual
artistic practice before Leonardo
formulated his
chance-image theory of pictorial invention.
That such was indeed the case may be gathered from
some visual evidence
which in point of time stands
midway between Alberti's De statua and “Botticelli's
stain.”
Interestingly enough, these are images in clouds,
rather than in the more
palpable substances that had
yielded chance images in medieval art, thus
indicating
a new awareness of the unstable and subjective charac-
ter of chance images. The best-known
instance is the
tiny horseman (Figure 11) in Mantegna's Saint Sebas-
tian in Vienna, which
has resisted all efforts to explain
Not only is the image so unobtrusive that most viewers
remain unaware of it; it is also incomplete, the hind
quarters of the horse having been omitted so as not
to break the soft contour of the cloud. Did Mantegna
plan it from the very start, or did he discover the
horseman only in the process of painting that particular
cloud and then, like the primeval sculptors of De
statua, added or took away a bit here and there in
order to emphasize the resemblance? Be that as it may,
we can only conclude that he must have been taken
with the idea of cloud images, and that he expected
his patron, too, to appreciate the downy horseman.
This patron would seem to have been a passionate
admirer of classical antiquity, for the panel is excep-
tionally rich in antiquarian detail; the artist even signed
it in Greek. Apparently the horseman is yet another
antiquarian detail, a visual pun legitimized by the
discussion of cloud images in Greek and Roman litera-
ture. It has been kept “semi-private” so as not to offend
less sophisticated beholders. If this view is correct, the
horseman need have no connection at all with the
chance images of Alberti, even though Mantegna must
have been well acquainted with Alberti's writings.
We know rather less about a second cloud image,
contemporary with Mantegna's
horseman, that occurs
in the Birth of the Virgin by
the Master of the Barberini
Panels. Here a cloud assumes the shape of a
dolphin(Figure 12).
A possible clue to its meaning is the flight
of
birds next to it, which may be interpreted as a good
omen for the newborn
child according to Roman belief.
Since the scene takes place in a setting
filled with
references to pagan antiquity, an
“auspicious” flight
of birds would be in keeping with
the rest; and the
cloud-dolphin would then be a further good omen
(dolphins having strongly positive symbolic connota-
tions), whether the image was planned or
accidentally
discovered. Flights of birds as a means of divination
are
mentioned so frequently in Roman literature that
they must have been
well-known among fifteenth-
century
humanists.
These early cloud images, however small and unob-
trusive, are the ancestors of a wide variety of figures
made of
clouds in sixteenth-century painting. Man-
tegna himself institutionalized the technique in his late
work (Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Grove of
Virtue, 1501-02, Paris, Louvre), Raphael introduced
cloud-angels in
his Madonna of Foligno and Sistine
Madonna, and Correggio depicted the amorous Jupiter
as a cloud in
his Io (Figure 13). Even the human soul,
hitherto
shown as a small figure with all the substance
of living flesh, could now
be given a cloudy, “ectoplas-
mic” shape, as in El Greco's Burial of Count
Orgaz(Figure 14).
What began as a semi-private visual pun
had become a generally accepted pictorial device for
representing incorporeal beings.
It would be fascinating to know whether Leonardo
practiced what he preached.
If he did, no evidence
of chance images derived from spotted walls or
similar
sources has survived among his known works. A Ma-
donna and Saints by one of his
Milanese followers
indicates that Leonardo's advocacy of chance images
was not confined to the theoretical plane. The group
is posed against an
architectural ruin among whose
wearing a broad-brimmed hat (Figure 15). Evidently
the artist, alerted by Leonardo's teachings, felt that
no ancient wall surface was complete without a chance
image. The influence of Leonardo's chance-image the-
ory can be seen also in the work of the Florentine
painter Piero di Cosimo, who according to Vasari was
in the habit of staring at clouds and spotted walls,
“imagining that he saw there equestrian combats and
the most fantastic cities and the grandest landscapes.”
Some of Piero's pictures show extravagantly shaped
willow trees with pronounced chance-image features
(Figure 16)but based on a close study of actual trees,
which he must have gone out of his way to find. Finally,
Leonardo's discussion of chance images may have in-
spired a curious pictorial specialty that flourished
eighteenth century. These paintings are done on the
polished surfaces of agates or other strongly patterned
stones in such a way that the colored veins become
part of the composition, providing “natural” back-
grounds of clouds, landscape, etc., for the figures. They
were prized as marvels of nature no less than of art
(a description cited by Baltrušaitis terms them “an
interplay of ars and natura”) and tended to accumulate
in the cabinets of royalty. Linked with the legendary
gem of Pyrrhus, they might be defined as elaborated
chance images were it not for the fact that the painter's
share always remains clearly distinguishable from na-
ture's. Apparently a real merging of the two spheres
was deemed aesthetically undesirable.
Despite his interest in unorthodox techniques—
confirmed by
recent studies which show that he often
painted not only with brushes but
with his fingers—
Leonardo did not favor homemade chance
images
such as “Botticelli's stain.” Nor does he
reveal how
the images found in spotted walls, etc., are to be
transformed into works of art. Apparently he thought
of this process as
taking place in the artist's mind,
rather than on the surface of the
painting, where the
task of “finishing the detail”
would be impeded by the
inherent vagueness of images resulting from
thrown
sponges. His ideal of objective precision, inherited from
the
early Renaissance, gave way in sixteenth-century
art theory to values more
attuned to the concept of
genius. Among them was sprezzatura, a recklessness
mirroring inspired frenzy at the
expense of rational
control, which meant a disregard of accepted usage
in literature and a rough, unfinished look in the visual
arts. The story of
the sponge-throwing Protogenes
could now provide a supreme example of such
reck-
lessness, as it does for
Montaigne (Essays, I, xxiv, xxxiv),
who cites it to
illustrate the close relationship between
chance (good luck, fortuna) and inspiration.
Dictionary of the History of Ideas | ||